died of T.B. when he was only thirty years old and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Thus the Rodgers and Macfarlans were neglected and, in their stead throughout the whole of Victorian Glasgow, a lickspittle, sentimental, pseudoreligious trash was foisted on the people of Glasgow in the name of poetry. Poetry was emasculated of its substance and strength and the rubbish published in Glasgow was a mere mockery of the real thing. All this happened at a time when Glasgow was rapidly becoming the greatest slum city in Europe. What you might ask is the connection between poetry and slums? Well, poetry is the seminal source of all literature and can evoke a powerful protest against injustice. But the purpose of a Culture controlled by the upper classes, who were prospering at the expense of the masses in 19th century Glasgow, was to stifle the literature of protest and 24
encourage a petty literature, a literature of escape from reality. It did not enhance reality, it worsened it. The other ‘escapes’ were the wine and spirit ‘palaces’ and the music halls: there were churches aplenty to comfort the pious. Schools and churches and newspapers combined to hide the facts and the real history of Glasgow from the people. A Glasgow person searching even today for a real history of his or her city is almost in the same bewildered state of a fosterchild looking for its real parents. It is so well concealed. The ‘masters’ of Culture have done their task exceedingly well. Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve), the greatest Scottish poet in the two centuries since Burns, saw through the ‘Culture Game’ and called for a new alertness among the people both in politics and creativity.
